Lilo & Stitch (2025) Review: Ohana on My Mind

Disney’s heartfelt Lilo & Stitch remake captures the original’s charm with stellar performances and a deft touch from director Dean Fleischer Camp.

Unlike the beleaguered Snow White remake that stumbled into theaters earlier this year, Lilo & Stitch (2025) proves that Disney’s IP mining can still yield gold when handled with care.

As part of my homework before catching the remake, I revisited the 2002 original and realized I’d only seen it once during its initial release. Back then, I was more interested in movies filled with spectacle and explosions than a blue alien learning about family from a six-year-old girl. I remembered the chaos, the Elvis soundtrack, the weirdness. What I missed was that it’s actually a story about grief disguised as a cartoon, a peculiar outlier in Disney’s catalog introducing a child who doesn’t quite fit in finding kinship in a creature even more out of place. It carried real emotional weight beneath its hectic exterior. That rediscovery made me hopeful, and a little nervous, about the remake. To my relief, it mostly works.

Young Lilo Pelekai (newcomer Maia Kealoha) is a fiercely imaginative but rebellious orphan living with her overworked older sister Nani (Sydney Elizebeth Agudong). Nani has put off college dreams to hold her family together under the added weight of the adult responsibility of caring for her sister. When Lilo adopts what she thinks is an unusual dog from the local shelter, she’s welcoming home Experiment 626, a genetic creation designed for destruction who’s being hunted by both his creator, the CIA, and galactic authorities. While aliens and government agents try to contain the mess he leaves in his wake, Lilo teaches Stitch (once again voiced by original creator/director Chris Sanders) a lesson about the meaning of ohana—family.

What’s remarkable about this production is how it respects rather than reveres its source material. The script tweaks the timeline slightly; Lilo and Nani’s parents have been gone longer now, and Lilo’s grief simmers beneath a layer of her relentless, almost defiant optimism. There’s more of Nani’s struggle and her exhaustion is palpable. This young woman is trying to parent a grieving child while fending off the system, and Agudong plays her with an intensity that feels authentic. Their sisterly arguments sting because they’re grounded in both love and desperation. The stakes of Nani keeping Lilo out of the foster system feel sharper and more urgent this time, and the film wisely lingers in that discomfort.

Kealoha is the revelation here. It’s rare to see a child actor this confident and emotionally precise in their first film. Hitting every emotional note without veering into melodrama or awkwardness, she navigates Lilo’s whiplash mood swings—lonely, funny, rebellious, tender—with clarity, allowing you to root for her not just because the script says so, but because Kealoha makes you believe every second. There’s nothing polished about her performance, and that’s what makes it a bullseye. She also shares remarkable chemistry with CGI Stitch, giving their bond a real feeling of honesty even when the effects get wobbly. No stranger to pulling pathos from unconventional leads, director Dean Fleischer Camp brings the same humanity he brought to Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. He treats Lilo not as comic relief or a precocious plot device but as a complete person.

Agudong’s Nani gets more screen time and depth than her animated counterpart, and the film is better and more balanced because of it. Disney wisely brought back original voice actors Tia Carrere (Easter Sunday), Amy Hill (Mack & Rita), and Jason Scott Lee (Mulan) in meaningful live-action roles, not just cameos, elevating material that could have felt derivative. Carrere’s social worker (Courtney B. Vance’s Cobra Bubbles is now a CIA agent undercover as Carrere’s superior) is a steadying presence, and Hill as the sharp-tongued neighbor Tūtū gets some of the film’s best laughs—a quiet nod to continuity that fans will appreciate.

That said, a few choices stumble. While Elvis didn’t completely leave the building, the King’s music isn’t as front and center as in the original, relegated to a few choice moments.  Giving Jumba (Zach Galifianakis, Only Murders in the Building) and Pleakley (Billy Magnussen, No Time to Die) human forms instead of committing fully to their zany alien designs feels like a compromise that limits the actors’ comedic potential and robs the film of its absurdist charm.  As the Grand Councilwoman, Hannah Waddingham (Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning) doesn’t have much to do but recite the lines exactly as her predecessor Zoe Caldwell did. And while the Stitch CGI is solid overall, there are moments, especially when actors interact with him, that veer into uncanny valley territory. The “petting air” syndrome strikes again.

Still, there’s a visual texture and tone here that works nicely. Cinematographer Nigel Bluck (The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent) trades postcard-perfect Hawaii for lived-in textures. With the cluttered interiors, the concrete backyards, and the lūʻau tents, the island doesn’t just look real; it feels inhabited. That authenticity matters, especially in a film so steeped in local identity.

The third act leans more into action than before, and some of the quieter beats get lost in the shuffle, but the emotion still cuts through. When Stitch finally says the line that launched a thousand parental tears, “This is my family. I found it, all on my own,” it doesn’t feel recycled; it feels well-won.

This isn’t only one of Disney’s best live-action remakes. It’s one of the few that remembers what made the original special in the first place without being shackled to it. Lilo & Stitch has always been a strange little story with an enormous heart. This new version doesn’t try to smooth out all the odd edges, daring to let things be weird, tender, and sad. That’s why it works. It trusts that we’re still capable of feeling something in a theater. Turns out, we are.

Lilo & Stitch (2025) will be released in UK & Irish cinemas on May 21, 2025 and in US theatres on May 23.